Floral Transcriptome Sequencing for SSR Marker Development and Linkage Map Construction in the Tea Plant (Camellia sinensis)

• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0081611
• Publication Date: 2013-11-26T23:01:12Z
• Authors: Li-Qiang Tan; Li-Yuan Wang; Kang Wei; Cheng-Cai Zhang; Li-Yun Wu; Gui-Nian Qi; Hao Cheng; Qiang Zhang; Qing-Mei Cui; Jin-Bo Liang
• Keywords: Molecular breeding; Candidate gene; Illumina dye sequencing; Genetic linkage

Despite the worldwide consumption and high economic importance of tea, plant (Camellia sinensis) is not well studied in molecular biology. Under few circumstances which studied, C. sinensis flowers, are important for reproduction cross-breeding, receive less emphasis than investigation its leaves or roots. Using high-throughput Illumina RNA sequencing, we analyzed a floral transcriptome, 26.9 million clean reads were assembled into 75,531 unigenes averaging 402 bp. Among them, 50,792 (67.2%) annotated with BLAST search against NCBI Non-Redundant (NR) database 10,290 (16.67%) detected that contained one more simple sequence repeats (SSRs). From these SSR-containing sequences, 2,439 candidate SSR markers developed 720 experimentally tested, validating 431 (59.9%) novel polymorphic sinensis. Then, consensus SSR-based linkage map was constructed covered 1,156.9 cM 237 distributed 15 groups. Both transcriptome information genetic presented here offer valuable foundation biology investigations such as functional gene isolation, quantitative trait loci mapping, marker-assisted selection breeding this species.